Indigenous Ownership and the Emergence of U.S. Liberal Imperialism

“Westward the Star of Empire takes its way,” and whenever that Empire is held by the white man, nothing is safe or unmolested or enduring against his avidity for gain.

Maris Bryant Pierce, Address on the Present Conditions and Prospects of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of North America, with Particular Reference to the Seneca Nation (1839)

Writers on U.S. imperialism have been trying to establish not only what it is but why it’s so peculiar—or how it is like but unlike other modern European imperialisms.¹ The continent is one obvious thing that makes it different, but, more specifically, it’s how the conflict with the indigenous people who were and are on the continent produced a certain kind of imperialism and imperial ideology that makes it different. That imperial ideology is peculiarly abstract. Scholars have remarked upon the powerful—and frustrating, for analysis—abstractions of U.S. imperialism. Or, as historian William Appleman Williams put it, in the United States empire is absent from explicit recognition but permeates U.S. society as a “way of life.”² The idea of empire itself is completely naturalized (thus the way of life) but also utterly depoliticized (thus the difficulty of recognizing it as a historical process comparable to others). By the 1830s the nation itself was understood as the site of an abstract world-historical conflict between savagery and civilization, a conflict in which civilization must and would prevail because God willed it and the continent required it. As the result of the inevitable forces of human history, imperial violence was not under anyone’s control and not anyone’s fault. Every dead Indian, real and imagined, told that story over and over again.

The conflict with indigenous people produced an imperial ideology that required a significant degree of abstraction because of the nature of relations with indigenous people. In North America Europeans set out to claim land they didn’t know that was occupied by people they couldn’t control. To make alliances, establish boundaries, and acquire land they made legal agreements, including treaties, that recognized indigenous ownership of land and therefore of political autonomy. After the formation of the United States that recognition, well established in North American legal and political practice, became a signifier of U.S. moral and political superiority. When indigenous nations resisted selling land, recognition became a problem for expansionists, who then needed to neutralize indigenous ownership but in such a way that it could be reconciled with the dominant political ideology. To do this they turned to an emerging narrative of a world-historical conflict between civilization and savagery in the United States itself in which indigenous people, as savage hunters, by definition couldn’t own property and therefore didn’t form governments. The purpose of this essay is to show that the construct of “savagism and civilization” in U.S. culture has a political context—the necessity of denying the principle of indigenous ownership—and a political effect—the positing of an imperial ideology, the primary claim of which was that imperialism didn’t exist as a historical process but was rather the unfolding of God’s will. The figure of the Indian was the linchpin of the imagined conflict between savagery and civilization, embodying that imperialist narrative. The figure wasn’t just a product of blind racial prejudice or ethnocentric cultural misunderstanding, it stripped away history, geography, political life, and traditions from indigenous people to produce an abstraction that demonstrated that they didn’t and couldn’t own land and form legitimate governments.

The relations between indigenous people and the United States, historically and in the present, are the relations of liberal imperialism—that imperialism that presents itself as benevolent and civilizing, if only the colonized would cooperate and be properly raised up. In literary and historical scholarship the term “liberal imperialism” usually describes British imperial history, particularly in late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century India, and is at present a term political neo-conservatives endorse as a positive description of hypothetical U.S. global hegemony.³ Historically, liberal imperialism figured...